There's a well-known Simpsons scene that has the disco-loving character (appropriately named) Disco Stu pointing at a chart that shows the genre's record sales increasing and increasing until the chart ends in 1976. "If these trends continue," he says, then doesn't ♎finish his thought and opts for a 🔴spirited, "Ayyyy!"
This episode aired in 1997, and was set in 1997.
The joke is: when a trend is at its most omnipresent, it seems like its dominance will continue forever. From 2007 to 2023, we lived through the reign of superhero movies. Now that Deadpool & Wolverines are far less common th🌠an Joker 2s, we can see those years for what they were: a trend. Disco died, superhero movies crashed to the earth, and li🅰ve-service games are living for shorter and shorter.
XDefiant Crashes And Burns, Like Concord Before It
XDefiant is just the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:latest casualty. Executive Producer Mark Rubin announced this week that the free-to-play hero shooter, which pitted factions from popular Ubisoft franchises like Far Cry and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Division against each other in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty-style deathmatches, will shutಞ down on June 3rd, 2025.
XDefiant Is Yet Anoꦍther Game That 𓄧Was Doomed From The Start
Ubisoft's shooter deserved better, but𒐪 wa🎃s never going to get it.
I liked XDefiant, but this isn't a surprise. The last time I checked in on the game was the day 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched and it was a ghost town. Each game was populated by bots, and that was when thཧe♔y were populated at all. I spent minutes running around in 'Emporium' and the map, set in an abandoned shopping mall, was fittingly abandoned.
But before XDefiant, other expensive live-service games from big publishers failed to find an audience in 2024. Concord is the year's most famous flop (and maybe 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the biggest video game flop of🍸 all time), spending nearly a decade in development to last two weeks in stores before 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation pulled it fr✃om sale. That game — which I thought looked kinda cool but never had the chance to try out — has since been permanently killed off and its team, Firewalk Studios, shut down in October.
The Flops Will Continue Until Morale Improves
The year's other giant flop, 🎉168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, spent a similar amount of time in de🐈velopment. It was the first fulꦦl-length game from developer Rocksteady Studios since Batman: Arkham Knight in 2015, and cost an enormous amount of money to make. But its peak . For comparison, . That game is 15 years old.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Skull and Bones and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Foamstars were also found among the wreckage, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The First Descendant, like XDefiant, started out strong, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:fell off hard. There were live-service games that foun꧒d success — like Helldivers 2, Palworld, Zenless Zone Zero, Content Warning and Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket — but the failures were so huge and money-burning, that it's hard to argue that this kind of game is a safe bet anymore.
So, why did publishers think that they𓂃 were? The easy answer is that games like Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, Apex Legends, and Fortnite have shown that, when one of these games hits, it's capable of raking in♒ money unlike anything else. That's definitely the primary factor. But I'd argue that in the past few years, the live-service genre has been buoyed just as much by one outlier period: 2020-2021.
How The Pandemic Skewed Multiplayer Expectations
During the first year of the pandemic, new multiplayer games blew up left and right. Animal Crossing: New Horizons hit at the start of lockdown and became synonymous with players needing to connect during the time of isolation. We were going to each others' islands, showing off our designs, buying fruit, and if you played your cards right, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elijah Wood might show up. It was a massive hit and showed that the way people were seeking connection in this time was through mul🥂tiplayer games.
Multiplayer games from huge developers were big during this time, too. I went back to Halo, playing through the first three campaigns with a friend. Warzone hit right before lockdown, and the Call of Duty battle royale became a massive hit. Va🐭lorant also launched this year and became one of the last shooters to ascend to the highest echelon of live-service g🌠ames.
But what was really surprising about the multiplayer games that broke out during the pandemic is that they were largely from lesser known studios. Mediatonic isn't a small company, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fall Guys was still an out-of-nowhere sensation that no one expected from the same company that made Murder by Numbers. Among Us was two-years-old when streamer Sodapoppin helped it shoot to world-conquering popularity. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Phasmophobia, a tiny horror game about hunting for footage of ghosts with your friends, was a similarly out-of-nowhere success. And in 2021, Valheim was the last big pan✃demic-era multiplayer success before vaccines became widely available and much of the population stoppeജd quarantining.
Eventually, the market calmed down, people settled into a few multiplayer games, and in the same way that people🌠 stopped making sourdough once they could leave the house, a lot of people stopped playing games altogether. But, if you looked at that 12-month period, it would be 🧸easy to come to the same conclusion as Disco Stu. If these trends continue… Ayyyy!
Sony's Live Service Vision Is Doomed, Insomniac Is The Future Of Triple-A
Sony's live😼 service gambit is already on the rocks, meanwhile, Insomniac continues to pump out incredible, bite-sized triple-A games year aft💙er year.
